Ken Jennings on His New Book of Kennections Quizzes, ‘Jeopardy!’, and His Favorite ’80s Wrestler

For more than a decade, Ken Jennings has been making even seasoned trivia lovers scratch their heads with his weekly Kennections quiz (appearing right here on Mental Floss). Here’s how it works: Jennings poses five questions. Once you’ve figured out the answer to those, the next challenge is to identify what all those answers have in common. Now, you can get 1000 of these tricky but entertaining quizzes in book form in The Complete Kennections.

We sat down with the Jeopardy! host to talk about all things Kennections and his new book, what he thinks of The New York Times Connections quiz—and more.

1. All About Kennections
2. This Is Jeopardy!
3. College Quiz Bowl and Beyond

All About Kennections

How did the idea for Kennections come about? And what can fans look forward to in The Complete Kennections? 

I’ve been writing these weekly Kennections quizzes for Mental Floss for almost a decade now, but actually, the quiz did not begin at Mental Floss. It was a puzzle idea from Parade magazine—the Sunday supplement from the good old days of Sunday newspapers. They had an idea, but their idea was pretty much just the name Kennections. And they were so in love with the pun. We just needed to figure out a format, and it’s a simple format. Five trivia questions. If you can answer them, all the answers have something in common.

After Parade got bought out by new ownership, the quiz moved to my friends at Mental Floss, where it’s been happily ever since. But a lot of those quizzes, because of the ownership change and just the vagaries of the internet, they’re all kind of lost in the bowels of the web now—you know, somewhere in the Wayback Machine, they’re all trapped, like the Phantom Zone from Superman. And I decided to release all these puzzles in a ginormous new book. There [are] 1000 Kennections trivia puzzles—5000 questions—in this new book, on sale now from Simon and Schuster.

What’s your process for creating a Kennections quiz? What comes first—the questions or the theme? 

So the trick of Kennections is the questions all have to work on their own as trivia, but then the answers have to work for an overarching theme. And that’s the tricky part. It generally hinges on things having double meanings, you know? Superman is a comic book, but he’s also a movie. He’s also an exercise. He’s also an R.E.M. song. You know, Superman can be a lot of things, and generally, it’s in those Wikipedia disambiguation pages of double meanings that I come up with these ideas. 

And it’ll usually just be like, “Oh, hey, this could be a theme. Oh, this could be a trivia question, and then maybe I could fit it into a theme. Can I come up with four others?” And that’s usually the crux of it. I’ve got a notes app on my phone full of years of failed Kennections ideas, waiting for a fourth or fifth answer.

How do you determine if a Kennections quiz is too hard or too easy? 

The truth about Kennections is it’s sometimes pretty hard. It’s on the hard side of fun trivia, just because [of] the structural conceit of having to satisfy ... all these answers have to be unambiguous, and they have to work toward the theme.

So I have a little less freedom than I would like sometimes to make the questions easier. Plus, there’s always the question writer’s compulsion to amp up the difficulty because they always seem easier to you. So I have to physically remind myself, “OK, let’s knock down a couple of these in difficulty.” I want people to have a fighting chance at the theme.

Do you ever ask your friends or family members to test them?

My guinea pigs are usually my family. My kids are actually very good at coming up with Kennections themes on the fly. You know, they will … they’re used to me asking them, “Hey, what’s easier, this or that?” Or, “If I said this, would you say A or B?” And now they’ll come to me with theme ideas, like, “Hey, Dad, if you don’t have Kennections about so-and-so ...” My son’s into baseball, my [other] kid’s really into Broadway, so there’s a lot of this kind of stuff.

Do you have any tips or tricks that might help people solve Kennections? 

Well, the cool thing with the book is we’ve made that—we’ve given the quiz its own difficulty slider. You can either solve the trivia question straight, or you can use the concealer, which is one of the flaps. These are called French flaps, I think, where you can cover up the part of the page to solve a question straight. Or if you open it up, you can see fill in the blanks—you could do it hangman style. So there’s one way you can make the quiz easier. You can adjust the difficulty at home. And you don’t even have to tell me. You don’t have to confess. You don’t have to tell your friends and family. You don’t have to tell your clergy. You can just do it the easy way, and that’s fine.

Where do you find ideas for Kennections questions?

The one place I have an ironclad rule about not getting Kennections ideas is from the suspiciously named New York Times daily quiz Connections. They think they’re so smart just because they spelled it right.

Connections is an amazing, fun game that I personally play every day, but it’s like eight years or so younger—maybe it’s nearly a decade younger than Kennections. And so I try never to duplicate their themes. Although nowadays, when I play Connections, I often think, “Oh, I’ve done this one. I think this one’s in the book. I know this one.” 

Basically, it’s all around you. If I’m waiting in line for a bagel, I’m looking at the bagel flavors on the menu, and I’m thinking, “poppy, everything, plain … Which of these could be a trivia answer? I could make this work as a Kennections puzzle.”

One of our readers wants to know: What do you think of The New York Times’ Connections quiz? 

Oh, I answered it early! I do love Connections. It’s part of my daily New York Times quiz diet. Generally, Connections is the one my wife and I do together over dinner, like, hunched over one phone. And we’re not allowed to put in a theme until the other person sees it. Those are our Connections rules of engagement. But, you know, let me just remind all you Connections fans that there’s a similar quiz called Kennections, which a) has a trivia angle and b) is spelled wrong.

This Is Jeopardy!

How has hosting Jeopardy! changed your perspective of your time as a contestant? 

I do feel like I will never be the Jeopardy! host that Alex Trebek was. He was just so perfect for that job. Like he’d been engineered in an Ontario lab for it. We miss Alex every day. 

But the one thing I can bring to the table is that I remember what it was like to be a contestant. So a lot of that is just remembering the panic. There’s a lot of big feelings when you’re a Jeopardy! player. And so every morning I come out and I try to chat with the players, I try to talk them down. I convey to them, if possible, that I’m on their side and everybody on the show is on their side, and we just want to see three people play well.

I hope it calms people down because I know from experience—it’s very daunting to be placed into that high-pressure cooker environment the very first time, probably, that you’re on TV. And it also just brings back fond memories. Every time I get to walk out on that set, I think about the summer of 2004 and what a crazy thing that was and how my life changed forever.

As Jeopardy! host, what’s your relationship to the writers’ room? Do you ever get to suggest clues or categories? 

First of all, we have a multi Emmy-winning staff of writers who are brilliant, and you really can’t overstate the difficulty of that job—producing not just the 61 clues you see every day, but they have to write bonus clues in every category.

The clues have to go through a rigorous research process. We’ve got, like, eight to 10 researchers who have to kick the tires on every single fact. The clues have to be ordered, shaped into boards, [and] Daily Doubles placed randomly drawn for each game. It’s a tremendous conveyor belt to get all those words on TV. And the writers are great at it. They do not need my help. 

But Alex would occasionally suggest an idea if he was on vacation. If he saw a fun fact about the Easter Island heads, he might come back to Culver City and suggest a clue or a category. And so I do the same thing—also in the notes app of my phone, next to the Kennections ideas, I have a list of Jeopardy! ideas, and if I think of something fun—[this] sounds like a Final Jeopardy!, this could be a punny category title—I will occasionally email it to the writers, and sometimes they humor me and I see them on the show.

What anecdote would you share if you were a contestant on Jeopardy! today? 

Please, I am begging you—for the love of God, do not make me come up with any more Jeopardy! anecdotes. That has got to be the hardest part of being on that show 75 times. Answering the clues is hard enough, but then they make you have a funny story every half an hour.

Nobody has 75 funny stories. If you watch Jeopardy!, you know that some people don’t even have one funny story. I sure ran out very quickly. But I have been traveling a lot lately, and that’s a very safe area for Jeopardy! stories. So if I had to do this again, I could say that a llama spit on me in Peru or something.

And that’s maybe not even true. But here’s the thing about Jeopardy!—we do not fact-check the stories. Every clue we fact-check rigorously. But if you have an anecdote about being a birthday clown, we are not going to call up your former employers and ask for references.

Are there any answers from your Jeopardy! run that you’re especially proud of getting right, or ones that you especially regret getting wrong? 

I will say from experience, you always remember the wrong responses. I remember reading John McCain’s obituaries, and apparently he was a contestant, by the way, a very good contestant on the Art Fleming era Jeopardy! in the ’70s after he got home from being a POW in Vietnam.

But I guess for the rest of his life, he was still kicking himself over the Final Jeopardy! he got wrong. Like, no matter what you accomplish, even if you’re Senator John McCain, you’re still going to be like, “Wuthering Heights,” you know, once a day, it’s still going to eat at you. For me, that was H&R Block, the final question I got wrong, which means pretty much every time I drive past a strip mall, I get to remember my failing. So that’s nice. 

The one I got right … [there] were many games where I needed to get a certain Daily Double or Final Jeopardy!, right? Or I would have lost. And there was one about the invention of the dishwasher that I was very proud that I got right, because I had never heard of this woman. I had never heard of the [circumstances] of the invention of the dishwasher. But the clue mentioned something about baskets, and I had to think of maybe a domestic invention of the 19th century that would have baskets. And it came to me in the nick of time. So thank you to the dishwasher.

College Quiz Bowl and Beyond

You captained your college quiz bowl team. What were your best and worst categories? 

That’s correct. Quiz Bowl is pretty much Team Jeopardy!. It’s usually four on four. Very difficult questions get red. They tend to start hard and get easier by the end, which is kind of how I structure Kennections as well. The great thing about it being Team Jeopardy! is [that] you don’t have to be good at everything. I was kind of the movie and literature guy on my team, but if you expected me to answer a math or an econ question, you were going to be waiting a long time.

What’s your favorite fact about ’80s pro wrestling? 

Wow. That’s great. I often get asked by Jeopardy! studio audiences, what category I would like to see more of on Jeopardy! And my joke answer is ’80s pro wrestling. Unfortunately, the Jeopardy! writers are in their writers’ room listening to the Q&A. And so what happened? A few months after I said that, there was an ’80s pro wrestling category.

So the next time they asked me, “What would you like to see more of on the show?” I said, “ ’80s monster trucks.” And then an ’80s monster truck category appeared. And now I am scared straight—that’s just too much power for one man. I am not going to reveal any more. Because if I were to say, “well, there should clearly be a category about ’80s General Hospital cameos or ’80s Bloom County punch lines,” all those things would appear on Jeopardy! and no one would like it, and it would be my fault. 

Favorite fact about ’80s pro wrestling? I mean, it’s just too broad a field for … I was just texting a friend, literally a minute ago, about Jake the Snake Roberts. 

Do you have a favorite wrestler from that era?

Oh, yeah. My favorite wrestler from the era is … it’s probably Koko [B. Ware]. Beware the Birdman. His gimmick was that he had, like, a cockatoo on his shoulder, which meant that if he did this [moves arm], he could make the cockatoo kind of dance. “Oh, look, Frankie’s dancing.” And the gimmick would be that his bird was dancing. But come on, Koko, we can see you’re just moving your elbow. It also meant he had to kind of walk to the ring like this [holds arm up], which is kind of an odd posture in any sport.

What’s the best book you’ve read recently? 

I’m kind of the guy who is always reading six books at once. I’m in the middle of Nathan Hill’s novel The Knicks, which is kind of a comedic novel about both Norwegian mythology and the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention protests. Probably the best such book about Norwegian mythology and the 1968 protests.

But I also just started a book about Tori Amos’ record Boys for Pele. My wife and I are reading the Victorian novels of Anthony Trollope. I think these hold up really well because they’re not all kind of sturm and drang like Dickens’s. They’re not as melodramatic as Dickens. They’re all just about little countryside affairs, you know, little ecclesiastical rivalries or aristocrats or lawyers in the most petty little fights you’ve ever heard of. I think they hold up really well. They really predicted what the 20th century was going to be like.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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